Yee, D-San Francisco, said his goal is to increase competition in the sale of bumpers, fenders, hoods and other nonmechanical parts.

“The reality is, the cost of repairs these days is just skyrocketing,” Yee said. “We’ve got to find a way to decrease that.”

Gene Crozat, a San Francisco Bay Area auto shop owner, said that replacing a broken headlamp for one luxury sports car can cost up to $2,000.

Other industry officials say it’s not uncommon to pay $1,500 to repair minor damage from a parking-lot fender bender.

The bill is a political minefield, however, fraught with the competing interests of insurance firms, auto body shops, carmakers and producers of generic — or “after-market” — crash-replacement parts.

Car manufacturers, by all accounts, currently dominate the field, producing up to four of every five crash-replacement parts nationwide.

The near monopoly by carmakers and the fact that repair costs typically are borne by insurance firms, not motorists, provides little public pressure to cut costs, Yee argues.

AB 1852 would create a state-sanctioned system for certifying generic parts in an attempt to encourage competition, upgrade quality and boost usage.

Under AB 1852, a “certified” generic part would be deemed of “like kind and quality” to car company repair parts, often called “factory” parts.

AB 1852 is sponsored by the Certified Automotive Parts Association which hopes to be licensed by the state Department of Consumer Affairs to serve as the state’s certification agency. CAPA offers voluntary certification on a relatively small scale, covering roughly 3 percent of all crash parts, Executive Director Jack Gillis said.

AB 1852 targets a field where comparable quality and safety cannot be determined at a glance, without considering tensile strength, chemical composition or corrosion resistance.

“When it comes to changing a (hood or bumper) after an accident, it’s a real complex process and few of us do it on our own,” Gillis said.

Crozat, who testified at a recent legislative hearing, said the price of carmakers’ parts is “ripping everybody off.” But body shops prefer them to generics for a simple reason: They usually fit, he said.

“I wouldn’t recommend a (generic) fender or hood because I know that I might go through three or four until I find one that maybe fits,” Crozat said.

Passing AB 1852 to declare that a certified part is equivalent to a factory part does not make it so, he said.

Five years ago, the state Bureau of Automotive Repairs surveyed 461 auto body shops and concluded that generic parts did not fit 56 percent of the time. By contrast, factory parts did not fit 12 percent of the time, and used parts did not fit 19 percent of the time, the report found.

Bureau researchers also conducted five vehicle tests in which they replaced original factory parts with generic parts. Four of the five generic parts were inferior, they concluded.

But Steve Welsh, owner of Artistic Collision Center in Rancho Cordova, Calif., said the quality of generic products has improved and that he typically uses CAPA-certified parts with great success.

“They have their place in the market,” he said.

Generic crash-replacement parts cost 20 percent to 65 percent less than their factory-made counterparts, according to a report by the Assembly Business & Professions Committee.

Gillis, the CAPA director, said complaints about the unreliability of generic parts stem partly from self-interest by auto body shops.

“Of course the body shop wants you to use and buy the more expensive part, because there’s a much greater profit there,” he said.

Gillis said the use of generics can be as effective and widespread in crash-replacement parts as it is in pharmaceuticals.

Gene Erbin, spokesman for the Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers, which opposes AB 1852, noted that CAPA was created by insurance companies that would benefit financially from greater use of generics.

Yee’s bill also would benefit insurance companies in two less visible ways, Erbin said, noting that current state law requires insurers who insist upon use of generic parts to:

— Ensure that their policyholder is notified of each non-factory part used. AB 1852 would delete that requirement.

— Warrant that any generic part used is of “like kind, quality, safety, fit and performance” to a factory part. A state-sanctioned certification program would reduce that legal burden, Erbin said.

Yee amended AB 1852 last week to address the concerns expressed by Erbin, who said afterward that the changes do not go far enough.

“Our initial impression is that, no, the bill is essentially unchanged,” he said.

(Distributed by Scripps-McClatchy Western Service, http://www.shns.com.)

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